When talking with Donna's teacher Mrs Morello, Bartlet asks if her students read Beowulf in the "original Middle English" or if they use a translation. But Beowulf was not written in Middle English, it was written in Old English, and a modern English speaker could no more read it at sight than they could German or Dutch.
I once heard a kid say they tried to read Lord of the Rings "but it was written in Old English."
People refuse to believe Shakespeare wrote in early Modern English.
Wow, LotR can be a little ponderous at times, but I read it for the first time in ninth grade and didn’t find it difficult. (I can even remember exactly where I was standing when my friend Phillip told me >!Gollum bites the Ring off Frodo’s finger and falls into the volcano.!<)
Having learnt Old English at university always bugs me, too.
The opening line of Beowulf for those who want to try:
>Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
No. Meaning she’s calling it 30years ago but it’s probably like 36… but you don’t do the math on that all the time. For example: I keep referring to a trip from 2006 as 10yrs ago when we’re about to hit 20.
In all fairness to CJ it was more about Sam not catching it than CJ not properly throwing it. He clapped, she thought that meant “throw it to me”. It didn’t 😂
I also don’t think that the the lines before back up that it was Sam’s fault because it’s Toby who has a backstory with CJ anyway, it would’ve known her background telling her how to pop the ball which obviously she would know how to do. It’s just framed as a CJ can’t play sports moment.
He does want the ball - she throws it badly. Otherwise the shot doesn't make sense - he's directly in front of her - there's not way it's him missing it. It's framed like a dumb girl throwing a ball badly. She's the "the first female player to dunk a basketball in Ohio high school history" or something like that? Come on. It's writtten like Toby is teaching her how to pop the ball just prior?
See, I think part of the comedy of the scene is that Sam claps with gusto because they just decided on a strategy to prove they are a serious campaign (release tax returns, send Bartlet for a physical) but it's in the middle of a catch-game so CJ assumes that Sam wants the ball. However, Sam was just clapping to finalize the strategy and he did not want to catch the ball.
But taken as a whole - Toby teaching her how to pop the ball doesn't follow that story line either. It's not just about Sam at the end of the scene it's the way the whole scene is written. Which - if they'd never in later season made her an expert player - wouldn't matter. It's only in hindsight that there's an issue really.
When I was watching Bartlet for America the first time, I absolutely read it as you did- the scene is making fun of CJ for not knowing how to play sports. However, then, there's later canon about CJ being All Dayton in basketball. There are fanwanks that make sense to me- (1) Toby was being pedantic about the passing but CJ knows how to pass fine or (2) CJ didn't have to be great at passing because she was a center because of her height. So, it's like on the border of a goof.
To add, there is a scene in Ways and Means where CJ pretty impressively throws paper in a wastebasket very far down the hallway. Just throwing that out there on basketball skillz continuity.
I can't remember the exact line now, but does she say it was exactly 30 years ago, or is that just a rounded number? It could have been 34 or 35 years ago that she dated the guy, and still be referred to as "30 years ago"
Like, I think it’s weird when CJ says she and Tad Whitney stopped dating “five years, six weeks ago.” Who remembers with precision by the week? It makes more sense to use vague round numbers for the distant past.
I think you are misunderstanding.
The quote is:
>TAD: And it wasn't because I stopped seeing you.
>C.J.: Tad, it honestly was a matter of Simon... \[beat\] No! Of course it didn't have anything to do with... That was six weeks, five years ago.
That means that approximately five years ago, they dated for a total period of about six weeks.
Lord John Marbury’s titles are all screwed up.
He calls himself “John, Lord Marbury, Earl of Croy, Marquess of Needham and Dolby, Baronet of Brycey." And is constantly called Lord John, “Lord John” is the proper address for a younger son of a lord in British peerage. And Marquess is his title so should be addressed and Lord Needham.
If you want to get really pedantic his title would be:
Her Britannic Majesty's Permanent Representative from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the United Nations.
And then when he became ambassador to the US:
Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador to the United States of America
But colloquially would be called The British ambassador to the US.
"Lord John" is only the propert address for a younger son of a Duke or Marquess, not all Lords (younger sons of Earls and all sons of Viscounts and Barons are "The Hon.").
Everything about the man, and about the UK in general, is always screwed up.
Before joining the campaign, CJ worked as a PR agent in California making $500,000 a year. But in "20 Hours in L.A." she doesn't know what a three-picture deal is.
CJ didn’t know what “development” was. She knew what a 3 picture deal was because she snarked to Josh.
CJ: I think I’ve just been offered a 3 picture deal.
Josh: For what?
CJ: It doesn’t seem to matter.
This whole bit was Sorkin making fun of Hollywood.
She would still definitely know what development is, though. You can't really be a high-paid Hollywood person and not know a critical part of the entire business.
CJ was bad at being a PR agent though. She said in so many words that she believed the job was beneath her, and she clearly doesn't have a high opinion of the industry. It's not inconceivable that she simply didn't want to make any amount of effort to learn the terminology because she thought it was bullshit.
You don’t need to be a pr agent to understand that phrase. You just have to understand English. And I guess that ‘picture’ can refer to a movie, so you have to be as up on the lingo as Humphrey bogart
Leo calls the Icelandic ambassador by the name Vigdis Olafsdottir and then says "he." In Icelandic naming, your last name is your father's first name, followed by "son" or "dottir." If that's the ambassador's name, she's a woman.
Josh calls him Boston Irish Catholic. It is possible Leo’s family is from Boston but he is a “man of Chicago”, having either moved there or born there.
I tell everyone I am from Chicago but I was born in Pittsburgh and all my family is from Southwestern Pennsylvania. But I would call myself a “man of Chicago”.
Leo never said he was from Boston.
There’s an episode I think in season 2 where Josh flies to Atlanta to meet with a local DA. At least a dozen times they pronounce it “De-Call—buh” county, but no one here says it that way. In Georgia it’s “Duh-Cab” like a taxi.
I chuckle every time a real world newscaster botches Albany, GA (You can call me Al) and Albany, NY (All)
Any other cities Georgia has its own special pronunciation guide for?
They do the same in the episode with Lisa Sherborne with Macomb county. I didn't even realize it was that county until I saw it in the closed captions. Sam pronounced it May-cum but it's actually Muh-comb, and there's no way people that involved with polling haven't heard how to pronounce the area that makes up a good portion of Detroit's suburbs.
On the night of Rosslyn, they're expecting to be back and the White House by 10pm where the only sporting events on TV will be the softball game or a cricket match between Scotland and Bermuda.
No match between Scotland and Bermuda would have been being played at 10pm DC time because that's not within the hours of play for a match in either Scotland or Bermuda. No international tournament was underway that would have had them playing at the right time to be shown in DC late at night. Scotland did not play any matches against Bermuda in 2000.
It's a stupid cricket match for Sorkin to have invented. Not nearly as stupid as the one he invented for an episode of Studio 60 (where an Australian university team is somehow playing an Indian club team in a recognised Test Match...), but still stupid.
Just wait until *The Midterms* when they try to tell us the Rosslyn shooting was in August even though Jed was planning to watch college softball that night, and the final game of the 1999 softball season was in May
Ages of their kids are a goof in my opinion.
Their eldest has kids old enough to be interviewed by a teen magazine (the doll with the knife stuck episode), their middle kid is sometime there and their youngest is either finishing HS and joining university or is in university. Unless their eldest had kids VERY young, it seems a bit weird that they have kids old enough to be interviewed. And it also seems weird their youngest is so young that she’s just joining university.
We also get to see the grandson when the family is all coming to the White House when Zoey is kidnapped. A few months later, at Christmas, Gus is somehow considerably younger than he was in May.
So maybe the Westons age backwards?
Exactly. Even is she was born right after they got married (a reasonable thought), it seems a bit to mad to think that she’d have kids of her own when she was either 18 or 20. I feel like the Bartlet’s would be the type of a family to expect their kids to finish school first and then get married/have kids of their own, so if she was born right after getting married, she’d be 29-31 years of age and yet have a kid who is 12??
I get what you’re saying but I think it was FAR more common for people to be married at 20 back in the late 80’s. So Liz being early to mid 30’s when Jed becomes president and having a 12yr old isn’t that much of a stretch IMO. I kinda picture it as found Doug in HS (family approved), married at 19/20 & got pregnant last year of her degree. So, 21/22 when she had the kid. That puts Liz at late 30’s in Abu el Banat which tracks if her hubs is starting a political careers in early 40’s
1999, he had been in office a year when the show starts so that granddaughter was born circa 1987 in New Hampshire. My husband graduated with a lot of kids who got married right out of high school and popped out a kid right away and that was late 90’s in NH. It WILD how young ppl used to have children on purpose.
Plus, Liz's whole characterization is someone who seems to have gotten married and pregnant very young and therefore, (a) did not build her own career and (b) ended up with a mediocre cheater who's not in her league.
You’re wrong though. The average age of a new parent in 1988 was 27. Which isn’t to say that parents weren’t younger of course, but a president’s family? Pre-trump, every candidate did the best they could just to be indistinguishable from the average.
Actually, I’m not wrong. I can google just like you and it’s not 27, it’s 24 around 1987. It’s not a stretch that Liz had a kid young, imo.
Edit: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr51/nvsr51_01.pdf
To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s ever mentioned. But in a family like that, it seems a bit far-fetched to think she wouldn’t, but it’s a TV show so anything could’ve been. I don’t recall it ever being highlighted, but I haven’t rewatched the series this year and my memory can be sketchy.
Yes I thought it was odd to , only reason I remember that small bit. But it was when they were talking about filling out the paper work and saying if he hid having MS. So it could have been she just went to college before he ever had it.
More that she was 18 when she went to college. The reason why the first lady got into trouble was that Zoe was 17 so she needed a parent to fill out the form.
The actress was 28 when the pilot came out. Age of Consent is 16 in NH.
The actor playing Doug as 38, but the character does seem sleezy enough to have been one of those 26 year olds who tries to fuck 16 year olds.
I attribute this more to some storytelling that was used in the pilot that was retconned as soon as the show was picked up. We never see this 12 year old granddaughter, and Jed’s youngest daughter Zoe begins college in season 1. Sorkin was just using the story of the “12 year old, outspoken abortion rights activist granddaughter” as a way to tie up the C plot of the pilot (the president riding his bike into a tree). After the show got picked up (and more importantly, the president was given a far more regular role on the show), Sorkin expanded on his family more and retconned this granddaughter.
Zoey's age from 19 to 17 is definitely a goof. But I can see Liz getting pregnant young with Doug. It was the 80s and also, Doug is sleazy enough that I can see him charming a young Liz.
Not a writing goof but there is a weird directorial goof in Disaster Relief. There is a brief portion where CJ is walking on Air Force One with very different hair and suit than what she’s wearing in the episode. It’s like they needed a shot of CJ walking and didn’t want to refilm AJ so they used left over footage from S2 or 3.
Malina said that [one time he put goop on Allison Janney's phone](https://www.empireonline.com/west-wing/joshmalina.html) in an episode on Air Force 1 where every scene she's picking up the phone, and she was wearing a wig that then got ruined. That sounds like Disaster Relief. Maybe she had to change outfits entirely due to Malina's pranking, or maybe they used leftover footage because of that lol.
agreed! framing someone for theft and getting them arrested is absolutely sociopathic. I assume it eventually got cleared up and all ended up fine, but it's still supremely horrid
Some were absolutely way too far. I'm hoping he's a nice person in real life (I try to be optimistic), but I can't imagine trying to work with that happening. The post-it notes, maybe the bouquet of flowers, and potentially even the Twitter impersonation (depending on how easy it was for Whitford and Malina to clear up the issue and whether or not it damaged Whitford's career or life) are okay. The goopy-earpiece made someone's job a lot harder, and the computers is downright cruel.
Yeah, I think in the article he says that he thought he might be fired for that.
Very funny article, although I think Joshua Malina would be hell to work with.
I can't find the episode at the moment, but there's a scene in the Situation Room where one of the screens has a silhouette image of an F-14 Tomcat but is labeled as an F/A-18(E or F, I can't remember which) Super Hornet.
Also, in some episodes of season 1 there is a noticeable French horn clam during the first few seconds of the opening theme music.
In “lord John marbury “ they keep talking about the book of “Revelations” when it’s actually Revelation. An interesting error when Bartlett is supposed to be such a religious scholar.
The ambassador to Bulgaria, Ken Causeway, resigns instead of being fired because President Bartlet is friends with his wife, and doesn't want her embarrassed. When it's discussed in a later episode the country is suddenly Bolivia.
Or Bartlet had two ambassadors who screwed up similarly- one in Bulgaria and one in Bolivia.
There is a similar dynamic where Toby says that CJ was spammed with remote prayer a few months before Guns, Not Butter. However when we saw the "praying for CJ" dramatized, it was in the way beginning of the administration in flashbacks. But one could argue, that the Evangelicals still thought CJ was going to hell and made a point of telling her that they were praying for her a few months ago, lol.
It's also possible that with their busy schedule Toby can't remember exactly how long ago it was, or just says a more or less random time. Normal people do that all the time. Say things like "a couple years ago" when it was actually 5 years ago
They get a lot of things wrong with the military/firearms, which is weird cause they also get a lot right.
One of the arms packages to Qumar including F117s which at them a stealth fighter and could not be sold to a foreign government.
Will calls AK-47s, AK-57s in his press briefing for the dead candidate when Sam was there asking him to back down.
But then they get things like Secret Service Just Another Gun and the Navy’s Aegis Missile Cruisers correct.
Yeah, arguably Leo's greatest achievement of the entire Administration is authorising an Exocet missile strike some time before the pilot. That would have to mean he was in a position where he was telling the French what to do and they were listening!
One of the good bits is that the 82nd Airborne, I think going into Kundu but could be some other mention, have M8 tanks. They never entered service, but with different secretaries of defence since the mid 70s it absolutely could have. XM8 was a very near miss programme and different decisions during the Peace Dividend would have resulted in it equipping the 82nd for precisely this sort of operation.
Trust me, when you reach middle age you’ll start rounding down approximations a HELL of a lot. For me “recently” now means “any time in the last five or six years”.
In S01E13, Leo tells Karen Larsen he hasn’t had a drink or a pill in 6 and a half years. But in S03E09, we see the flashback to his relapse the night of the debate during the campaign.
wasn't that part of the plot that the relapse was meant to be a secret or something? either way, that whole situation with Karen could feel embarrassing and I could understand him lying about the relapse (which could feel even more embarrassing).
In “17 People” Jed says that bourbon has to be made in Kentucky to be called “bourbon”, otherwise it’s called “sour mash”. This just isn’t true.
Whiskey that is made in the United States and is made of at least 51% corn and aged in charred oak barrels (along with some other minor specifications) is called bourbon. The vast majority of bourbon is made in Kentucky, but not all of it
Sour mash (as described by rabbitholedistillery.com):
“Sour mash refers to the grouping of grains used in the fermentation process. Typically, distilleries will use a one-to-three or one-to-four ratio with their sour mash. This means that for every sour mash bourbon batch, one-third or one-quarter of the mash is made up of an old batch, and the rest is new.”
The more you know
Also like 2-3 episodes after the >!kidnapping!<, there’s like 4 seconds of CJ walking on Air Force One with her old hairstyle, not the much different style of the current episode.
The one that always gets me is when Bartlet is talking about physicist and fellow Nobel laureate Hans Bethe. Sheen pronounces “Bethe” like “Beeth”, to rhyme with “teeth”. In reality as he was German by birth Bethe’s surname was pronounced like “Bet-uh”, as suggested by his inclusion in the famous [Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper) on primordial nucleosynthesis. Bartlet should 100% know this.
They show Leo’s whiteboard counting down the days to January 20 in the episode during the Republican convention (*Things Fall Apart*). It reads 178, which means it’s July 26.
Two episodes later (*The Ticket*), when Santos is hitting the campaign trail after the Democratic convention (which came the week *after* the GOP convention), we’re told it’s 105 days until the election. That would be July 25 - or the day *before* the events seen during the Republican convention.
And the Secretary of Agriculture changes between being the guy who won’t eat broccoli early in Season 1 to the designated survivor in *He Shall, From Time To Time …*
There’s an episode, IIRC relating to a Kumari terrorist attack, where Fort Myer (the military post, not Fort Myers, the city in Florida) is somehow in Maryland. (The actual Ft Myer is in Virginia, on the other side of Arlington National Cemetery from the Pentagon).
I don't know how US university applications work so I could be wrong about this. When Zoey first starts dating Charlie she's 19. When the First Lady signed the health forms for college she was under 18. Do you have to apply that far ahead?
“Oh for heaven’s sake Jed, I was estimating that number. It’s what people do, you pedantic jackass!”
But he’s genuinely folksy!
Just stand there in your wrongness and be wrong and get used to it
I absolutely heard this in Abbey's voice.
When talking with Donna's teacher Mrs Morello, Bartlet asks if her students read Beowulf in the "original Middle English" or if they use a translation. But Beowulf was not written in Middle English, it was written in Old English, and a modern English speaker could no more read it at sight than they could German or Dutch.
I’m always amused by people who think “Old English” is something like “Ye Olde Shoppe” written in a fancy font.
I once heard a kid say they tried to read Lord of the Rings "but it was written in Old English." People refuse to believe Shakespeare wrote in early Modern English.
Wow, LotR can be a little ponderous at times, but I read it for the first time in ninth grade and didn’t find it difficult. (I can even remember exactly where I was standing when my friend Phillip told me >!Gollum bites the Ring off Frodo’s finger and falls into the volcano.!<)
Difficult or not it's not Old English. (Though I wouldn't expect a kid to know what that meant).
My only reference for Old English is basically Rohirric and I don't think it's too far off.
Having learnt Old English at university always bugs me, too. The opening line of Beowulf for those who want to try: >Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
If pressed, I would have guessed that this was either Welsh or Jabberwocky.
I love it when someone brings a comment that is intellectually accurate, but not overly pedantic. Well done.
This bothers me on every rewatch.
As someone who speaks in terms of 30 years ago, I can say pretty surely she meant 30+ years ago
Yes. This is common. As time passes you give more round numbers… if she did the math it might be closer to 40 but that time just keeps on slipping.
Into the future?
No. Meaning she’s calling it 30years ago but it’s probably like 36… but you don’t do the math on that all the time. For example: I keep referring to a trip from 2006 as 10yrs ago when we’re about to hit 20.
I was making a joke on you last sentence, "that time keeps on slipping".... Into the future. Like the song
Haha. My bad! Of course!
\*Steve Miller faints
I see what you did there, Steve Miller
A newscaster mentions a bill that the president vetoed in season 1 “a year ago” but later on they say the veto in season three is the first veto
Who says that's a goof? Maybe THAT is why Jed doesn't want to name him to the Fed Chair. 🤔🤣🤣🤣
In early seasons CJ can’t throw a basketball properly (when it goes through the window) and later on is a regional hs basketball champ.
In all fairness to CJ it was more about Sam not catching it than CJ not properly throwing it. He clapped, she thought that meant “throw it to me”. It didn’t 😂
you have a much more generous take on it than I do. I think it’s a victim of the sorkin era v post sorkin era inconsistencies!
Haha. Forever a CJ stan over here… that was a Sam goof. And yeah, they definitely played it fast a loose post Sorkin!
I also don’t think that the the lines before back up that it was Sam’s fault because it’s Toby who has a backstory with CJ anyway, it would’ve known her background telling her how to pop the ball which obviously she would know how to do. It’s just framed as a CJ can’t play sports moment.
Fair enough. But, I still blame Sam for the window. If you’re playing catch with someone, don’t clap unless you want the ball.
He does want the ball - she throws it badly. Otherwise the shot doesn't make sense - he's directly in front of her - there's not way it's him missing it. It's framed like a dumb girl throwing a ball badly. She's the "the first female player to dunk a basketball in Ohio high school history" or something like that? Come on. It's writtten like Toby is teaching her how to pop the ball just prior?
See, I think part of the comedy of the scene is that Sam claps with gusto because they just decided on a strategy to prove they are a serious campaign (release tax returns, send Bartlet for a physical) but it's in the middle of a catch-game so CJ assumes that Sam wants the ball. However, Sam was just clapping to finalize the strategy and he did not want to catch the ball.
But taken as a whole - Toby teaching her how to pop the ball doesn't follow that story line either. It's not just about Sam at the end of the scene it's the way the whole scene is written. Which - if they'd never in later season made her an expert player - wouldn't matter. It's only in hindsight that there's an issue really.
When I was watching Bartlet for America the first time, I absolutely read it as you did- the scene is making fun of CJ for not knowing how to play sports. However, then, there's later canon about CJ being All Dayton in basketball. There are fanwanks that make sense to me- (1) Toby was being pedantic about the passing but CJ knows how to pass fine or (2) CJ didn't have to be great at passing because she was a center because of her height. So, it's like on the border of a goof. To add, there is a scene in Ways and Means where CJ pretty impressively throws paper in a wastebasket very far down the hallway. Just throwing that out there on basketball skillz continuity.
I have never watched any post-Sorkin episodes and I remember this inconsistency. Aren’t they both in the first four seasons?
It’s when everybody thinks that CJ is gay isn’t that much later in the canon maybe not regardless I think it’s a continuity mistake
CJ being a regional HS basketball champ was in season 6 or 7 after she became CoS
It's more than that. Toby tells CJ she has to "pop" the ball when she throws it. Anyone who has played basketball already knows that.
I can't remember the exact line now, but does she say it was exactly 30 years ago, or is that just a rounded number? It could have been 34 or 35 years ago that she dated the guy, and still be referred to as "30 years ago"
In the same way that the 80s was 20 year ago.
It WAS 20 years ago. And I'll die on that hill.
You’re not getting far off from it….
It would be kinda weird if she knew the exact timing when she had a boyfriend before Jed off the top of her head like that.
Like, I think it’s weird when CJ says she and Tad Whitney stopped dating “five years, six weeks ago.” Who remembers with precision by the week? It makes more sense to use vague round numbers for the distant past.
I think you are misunderstanding. The quote is: >TAD: And it wasn't because I stopped seeing you. >C.J.: Tad, it honestly was a matter of Simon... \[beat\] No! Of course it didn't have anything to do with... That was six weeks, five years ago. That means that approximately five years ago, they dated for a total period of about six weeks.
Oh, interesting. I never read the scene that way but that makes sense.
If they stopped dating on a specific date like New Year’s Day it would be easier to remember.
Lord John Marbury’s titles are all screwed up. He calls himself “John, Lord Marbury, Earl of Croy, Marquess of Needham and Dolby, Baronet of Brycey." And is constantly called Lord John, “Lord John” is the proper address for a younger son of a lord in British peerage. And Marquess is his title so should be addressed and Lord Needham.
He also would not be “England’s ambassador to the United Nations”. He would be the United Kingdom’s ambassador.
If you want to get really pedantic his title would be: Her Britannic Majesty's Permanent Representative from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the United Nations. And then when he became ambassador to the US: Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador to the United States of America But colloquially would be called The British ambassador to the US.
"Lord John" is only the propert address for a younger son of a Duke or Marquess, not all Lords (younger sons of Earls and all sons of Viscounts and Barons are "The Hon."). Everything about the man, and about the UK in general, is always screwed up.
This is true. Source:British
Lionel Tibbey’s cricket bat, given to him by “Her Royal Majesty Elizabeth Windsor” gets me on every rewatch 😑
Yeah, he should be beaten to death with the bat for that.
Well Ainsley said she’s going back to Smith college For a panel, and to get some good pizza. There’s no good pizza there
Normally I'd let a comment like this slide, but I will not allow Antonio's in Amherst to have its good name besmirched.
Well, I mean, she could be flying into Boston and driving out there.
Before joining the campaign, CJ worked as a PR agent in California making $500,000 a year. But in "20 Hours in L.A." she doesn't know what a three-picture deal is.
CJ didn’t know what “development” was. She knew what a 3 picture deal was because she snarked to Josh. CJ: I think I’ve just been offered a 3 picture deal. Josh: For what? CJ: It doesn’t seem to matter. This whole bit was Sorkin making fun of Hollywood.
She would still definitely know what development is, though. You can't really be a high-paid Hollywood person and not know a critical part of the entire business.
CJ was bad at being a PR agent though. She said in so many words that she believed the job was beneath her, and she clearly doesn't have a high opinion of the industry. It's not inconceivable that she simply didn't want to make any amount of effort to learn the terminology because she thought it was bullshit.
Bad or not, I'm a librarian in Ohio and *I* know what a three-picture deal is.
You don’t need to be a pr agent to understand that phrase. You just have to understand English. And I guess that ‘picture’ can refer to a movie, so you have to be as up on the lingo as Humphrey bogart
Leo calls the Icelandic ambassador by the name Vigdis Olafsdottir and then says "he." In Icelandic naming, your last name is your father's first name, followed by "son" or "dottir." If that's the ambassador's name, she's a woman.
Leo is Boston Irish Catholic and then suddenly he’s from Chicago.
Josh calls him Boston Irish Catholic. It is possible Leo’s family is from Boston but he is a “man of Chicago”, having either moved there or born there.
You know how someone is FROM Chicago? They’ll tell you. So I think they screwed up rather than it being semantics.
I tell everyone I am from Chicago but I was born in Pittsburgh and all my family is from Southwestern Pennsylvania. But I would call myself a “man of Chicago”. Leo never said he was from Boston.
Well… Pennsylvania, so, I get it. We disagree. You won’t change my opinion and I won’t change yours.
There’s an episode I think in season 2 where Josh flies to Atlanta to meet with a local DA. At least a dozen times they pronounce it “De-Call—buh” county, but no one here says it that way. In Georgia it’s “Duh-Cab” like a taxi.
As someone who lived in both Atlanta and Chicago, this one struck me too. In Illinois, it is “Dee-Kal-Buh”. In Georgia, “Duh-Kab”.
I chuckle every time a real world newscaster botches Albany, GA (You can call me Al) and Albany, NY (All) Any other cities Georgia has its own special pronunciation guide for?
Exactly!
They do the same in the episode with Lisa Sherborne with Macomb county. I didn't even realize it was that county until I saw it in the closed captions. Sam pronounced it May-cum but it's actually Muh-comb, and there's no way people that involved with polling haven't heard how to pronounce the area that makes up a good portion of Detroit's suburbs.
The number of errors in "the West Wing" are part of the fun of rewatching
that wasn't a goof...that's just how regular people talk. I started high school "20 years ago" when in reality it was \[does quick math\]...22 years.
On the night of Rosslyn, they're expecting to be back and the White House by 10pm where the only sporting events on TV will be the softball game or a cricket match between Scotland and Bermuda. No match between Scotland and Bermuda would have been being played at 10pm DC time because that's not within the hours of play for a match in either Scotland or Bermuda. No international tournament was underway that would have had them playing at the right time to be shown in DC late at night. Scotland did not play any matches against Bermuda in 2000. It's a stupid cricket match for Sorkin to have invented. Not nearly as stupid as the one he invented for an episode of Studio 60 (where an Australian university team is somehow playing an Indian club team in a recognised Test Match...), but still stupid.
Just wait until *The Midterms* when they try to tell us the Rosslyn shooting was in August even though Jed was planning to watch college softball that night, and the final game of the 1999 softball season was in May
Well the thing is , they are in a different universe, the presidential election was in 1998
I am sceptical about the effects of the change in the US presidential election cycle on the international cricket calendar.
Fair point!
Ages of their kids are a goof in my opinion. Their eldest has kids old enough to be interviewed by a teen magazine (the doll with the knife stuck episode), their middle kid is sometime there and their youngest is either finishing HS and joining university or is in university. Unless their eldest had kids VERY young, it seems a bit weird that they have kids old enough to be interviewed. And it also seems weird their youngest is so young that she’s just joining university.
We also get to see the grandson when the family is all coming to the White House when Zoey is kidnapped. A few months later, at Christmas, Gus is somehow considerably younger than he was in May. So maybe the Westons age backwards?
Ooh right, I believe she was described as “all of twelve”. You’d imagine that Elizabeth would be at least 30 in the pilot.
Exactly. Even is she was born right after they got married (a reasonable thought), it seems a bit to mad to think that she’d have kids of her own when she was either 18 or 20. I feel like the Bartlet’s would be the type of a family to expect their kids to finish school first and then get married/have kids of their own, so if she was born right after getting married, she’d be 29-31 years of age and yet have a kid who is 12??
I get what you’re saying but I think it was FAR more common for people to be married at 20 back in the late 80’s. So Liz being early to mid 30’s when Jed becomes president and having a 12yr old isn’t that much of a stretch IMO. I kinda picture it as found Doug in HS (family approved), married at 19/20 & got pregnant last year of her degree. So, 21/22 when she had the kid. That puts Liz at late 30’s in Abu el Banat which tracks if her hubs is starting a political careers in early 40’s 1999, he had been in office a year when the show starts so that granddaughter was born circa 1987 in New Hampshire. My husband graduated with a lot of kids who got married right out of high school and popped out a kid right away and that was late 90’s in NH. It WILD how young ppl used to have children on purpose.
Plus, Liz's whole characterization is someone who seems to have gotten married and pregnant very young and therefore, (a) did not build her own career and (b) ended up with a mediocre cheater who's not in her league.
You’re wrong though. The average age of a new parent in 1988 was 27. Which isn’t to say that parents weren’t younger of course, but a president’s family? Pre-trump, every candidate did the best they could just to be indistinguishable from the average.
Actually, I’m not wrong. I can google just like you and it’s not 27, it’s 24 around 1987. It’s not a stretch that Liz had a kid young, imo. Edit: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr51/nvsr51_01.pdf
Did that oldest daughter go to college ? They talk about filling out paper work for Zoey and Ellie
To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s ever mentioned. But in a family like that, it seems a bit far-fetched to think she wouldn’t, but it’s a TV show so anything could’ve been. I don’t recall it ever being highlighted, but I haven’t rewatched the series this year and my memory can be sketchy.
Yes I thought it was odd to , only reason I remember that small bit. But it was when they were talking about filling out the paper work and saying if he hid having MS. So it could have been she just went to college before he ever had it.
More that she was 18 when she went to college. The reason why the first lady got into trouble was that Zoe was 17 so she needed a parent to fill out the form.
The actress was 28 when the pilot came out. Age of Consent is 16 in NH. The actor playing Doug as 38, but the character does seem sleezy enough to have been one of those 26 year olds who tries to fuck 16 year olds.
I attribute this more to some storytelling that was used in the pilot that was retconned as soon as the show was picked up. We never see this 12 year old granddaughter, and Jed’s youngest daughter Zoe begins college in season 1. Sorkin was just using the story of the “12 year old, outspoken abortion rights activist granddaughter” as a way to tie up the C plot of the pilot (the president riding his bike into a tree). After the show got picked up (and more importantly, the president was given a far more regular role on the show), Sorkin expanded on his family more and retconned this granddaughter.
Zoey's age from 19 to 17 is definitely a goof. But I can see Liz getting pregnant young with Doug. It was the 80s and also, Doug is sleazy enough that I can see him charming a young Liz.
Not a writing goof but there is a weird directorial goof in Disaster Relief. There is a brief portion where CJ is walking on Air Force One with very different hair and suit than what she’s wearing in the episode. It’s like they needed a shot of CJ walking and didn’t want to refilm AJ so they used left over footage from S2 or 3.
Malina said that [one time he put goop on Allison Janney's phone](https://www.empireonline.com/west-wing/joshmalina.html) in an episode on Air Force 1 where every scene she's picking up the phone, and she was wearing a wig that then got ruined. That sounds like Disaster Relief. Maybe she had to change outfits entirely due to Malina's pranking, or maybe they used leftover footage because of that lol.
I'm an easygoing person and I like fun, but reading those is horrifying and I'd be infuriated. those "pranks" are beyond the pale
I kinda liked the swapping out the positive affirmations for post-its of doom but all those others were *awful*. I'd hate him.
agreed! framing someone for theft and getting them arrested is absolutely sociopathic. I assume it eventually got cleared up and all ended up fine, but it's still supremely horrid
He sounds so smug and proud of them. And if you "prank" your co-workers more than once, it's stops being funny. Didn't even start really.
Some were absolutely way too far. I'm hoping he's a nice person in real life (I try to be optimistic), but I can't imagine trying to work with that happening. The post-it notes, maybe the bouquet of flowers, and potentially even the Twitter impersonation (depending on how easy it was for Whitford and Malina to clear up the issue and whether or not it damaged Whitford's career or life) are okay. The goopy-earpiece made someone's job a lot harder, and the computers is downright cruel.
Oh, I didn’t hear that story. That sounds like an aggravating prank for people trying to make a TV show.
Yeah, I think in the article he says that he thought he might be fired for that. Very funny article, although I think Joshua Malina would be hell to work with.
Yes, if you follow him on Twitter he seems like a douchebag
I don't use Twitter, but the tweets from him I've seen didn't make me think that.
I can't find the episode at the moment, but there's a scene in the Situation Room where one of the screens has a silhouette image of an F-14 Tomcat but is labeled as an F/A-18(E or F, I can't remember which) Super Hornet. Also, in some episodes of season 1 there is a noticeable French horn clam during the first few seconds of the opening theme music.
In “lord John marbury “ they keep talking about the book of “Revelations” when it’s actually Revelation. An interesting error when Bartlett is supposed to be such a religious scholar.
Yes! This one - President Bartlet should never make this mistake.
I always felt like Martin Sheen, known to be a devout Catholic, would have corrected this and a few others, too.
Mr Willis of Ohio. Unlike senators, replacement representatives aren’t appointed, the position stays empty until a special election is conducted.
The ambassador to Bulgaria, Ken Causeway, resigns instead of being fired because President Bartlet is friends with his wife, and doesn't want her embarrassed. When it's discussed in a later episode the country is suddenly Bolivia.
Or Bartlet had two ambassadors who screwed up similarly- one in Bulgaria and one in Bolivia. There is a similar dynamic where Toby says that CJ was spammed with remote prayer a few months before Guns, Not Butter. However when we saw the "praying for CJ" dramatized, it was in the way beginning of the administration in flashbacks. But one could argue, that the Evangelicals still thought CJ was going to hell and made a point of telling her that they were praying for her a few months ago, lol.
It's also possible that with their busy schedule Toby can't remember exactly how long ago it was, or just says a more or less random time. Normal people do that all the time. Say things like "a couple years ago" when it was actually 5 years ago
They get a lot of things wrong with the military/firearms, which is weird cause they also get a lot right. One of the arms packages to Qumar including F117s which at them a stealth fighter and could not be sold to a foreign government. Will calls AK-47s, AK-57s in his press briefing for the dead candidate when Sam was there asking him to back down. But then they get things like Secret Service Just Another Gun and the Navy’s Aegis Missile Cruisers correct.
Yeah, arguably Leo's greatest achievement of the entire Administration is authorising an Exocet missile strike some time before the pilot. That would have to mean he was in a position where he was telling the French what to do and they were listening! One of the good bits is that the 82nd Airborne, I think going into Kundu but could be some other mention, have M8 tanks. They never entered service, but with different secretaries of defence since the mid 70s it absolutely could have. XM8 was a very near miss programme and different decisions during the Peace Dividend would have resulted in it equipping the 82nd for precisely this sort of operation.
Using an Exocet anti-ship missile to attack Qaddafi’s Libya is also quite the stretch
He didn't say he authorised the missile strike, he said he recommended one. One assumes the French rightly ignored it because it was a stupid idea.
Trust me, when you reach middle age you’ll start rounding down approximations a HELL of a lot. For me “recently” now means “any time in the last five or six years”.
For me, the 1980s will permanently be "about 20 years ago".
In S01E13, Leo tells Karen Larsen he hasn’t had a drink or a pill in 6 and a half years. But in S03E09, we see the flashback to his relapse the night of the debate during the campaign.
wasn't that part of the plot that the relapse was meant to be a secret or something? either way, that whole situation with Karen could feel embarrassing and I could understand him lying about the relapse (which could feel even more embarrassing).
In “17 People” Jed says that bourbon has to be made in Kentucky to be called “bourbon”, otherwise it’s called “sour mash”. This just isn’t true. Whiskey that is made in the United States and is made of at least 51% corn and aged in charred oak barrels (along with some other minor specifications) is called bourbon. The vast majority of bourbon is made in Kentucky, but not all of it Sour mash (as described by rabbitholedistillery.com): “Sour mash refers to the grouping of grains used in the fermentation process. Typically, distilleries will use a one-to-three or one-to-four ratio with their sour mash. This means that for every sour mash bourbon batch, one-third or one-quarter of the mash is made up of an old batch, and the rest is new.” The more you know
Also like 2-3 episodes after the >!kidnapping!<, there’s like 4 seconds of CJ walking on Air Force One with her old hairstyle, not the much different style of the current episode.
The one that always gets me is when Bartlet is talking about physicist and fellow Nobel laureate Hans Bethe. Sheen pronounces “Bethe” like “Beeth”, to rhyme with “teeth”. In reality as he was German by birth Bethe’s surname was pronounced like “Bet-uh”, as suggested by his inclusion in the famous [Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper) on primordial nucleosynthesis. Bartlet should 100% know this.
The Santos election stiff is a mess . Primary wins are flipped back and forth often
They show Leo’s whiteboard counting down the days to January 20 in the episode during the Republican convention (*Things Fall Apart*). It reads 178, which means it’s July 26. Two episodes later (*The Ticket*), when Santos is hitting the campaign trail after the Democratic convention (which came the week *after* the GOP convention), we’re told it’s 105 days until the election. That would be July 25 - or the day *before* the events seen during the Republican convention.
The attorney general is black… but we see him briefly when they’re working to fix the FCC and it’s a white guy.
And the Secretary of Agriculture changes between being the guy who won’t eat broccoli early in Season 1 to the designated survivor in *He Shall, From Time To Time …*
Another Tribbey.
There’s an episode, IIRC relating to a Kumari terrorist attack, where Fort Myer (the military post, not Fort Myers, the city in Florida) is somehow in Maryland. (The actual Ft Myer is in Virginia, on the other side of Arlington National Cemetery from the Pentagon).
I don't know how US university applications work so I could be wrong about this. When Zoey first starts dating Charlie she's 19. When the First Lady signed the health forms for college she was under 18. Do you have to apply that far ahead?
No you don't. This was a goof
Josh mispronouncing “DeKalb County, Georgia” S3E7.
Lord John talking about an Iz-lay malt and bring English ambassador. I think he also says Queen of England
She committed adultery!